Saleforce’s Enterprise Collaboration App Chatter.com Now Live

Salesforce has made its Facebook-like enterprise collaboration app, Chatter, generally available at Chatter.com. The app was previously only available to Salesforce customers, but now anyone can get a free account simply by signing up using their company email address.

Chatter provides real-time status updates in an activity stream, like Facebook. It’s similar to many other enterprise social networking apps, like Yammer and tibbr: users can “follow” (subscribe to updates) from other people, documents and groups. While Chatter.com might not be quite as advanced from a features point of view as some of its competitors, what it does have that other enterprise social networking apps don’t is Salesforce’s marketing clout. The company will be running a television ad campaign (featuring will.i.am) to promote the product and can expect to acquire a large number of users, particularly as enterprise social networking tools like this are viral in nature: it only takes one employee at a company to start using and evangelizing the product for its use to start spreading throughout the organization.

Chatter.com is free to subscribers signing up with a company email address; it then limits connections to other email addresses form the same domain (so if your company often collaborates with people with people on different domains, or has employees on different domains, Chatter.com is probably not suitable for you). It’s available via the website and can also be accessed using desktop and mobile apps (for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry.